Known Gallery in Los Angeles has been on a roll these past couple years. With its artist base and clientele, it has become an epicenter of graffiti crossing over into gallery scene, and the strength of its latest exhibition shows that it’s even more than that.

Eric Haze’s ‘New Mathematics,” featuring 35 paintings and 15 drawings, examines the complex relationship between abstraction, typography and design by using repetitive geometric patterns and the delicate interplay of positive and negative space to create a compelling, overarching representation. Haze’s work makes clear reference to his graffiti past, but the work moves away from slogans and toward more a universal exploration of how graffiti captures the eye. He uses positive and negative space to break down the graffiti paradigm into compositions that can be more understood.

Haze began as a graffiti writer, eventually moving towards the world of design and working with such hip-hop acts as EPMD and the Beastie Boys before fielding larger clients such as Nike, Casio and MTV. His work has been exibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Hong Kong and was recently featured in the exhibition, “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Greg Lamarche’s “I Can See For Miles” is an exercise in the abstraction of graffiti’s visual language. Lamarche uses found material and his personal collection of numerous printed materials to create intricately hand-cut collages. His work takes the common lettering of graffiti and warps what the brain can recognize into abstract lines of color. It’s as if one were staring at graffiti on a wall and proceeded to shake their head from side to side violently. Lamarche has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Phoenix, and Modern Painters.

“New Mathematics” By Eric Haze and “I Can See For Miles” By Greg Lamarche will be on display at Known Gallery until October 8th, 2011.

Dad worked for the State Department in Mexico City until I was five and then was transferred to New York where they put us in a large apartment on Park Avenue. I didn’t much care for high school and soon found myself walking the streets with a Leica Dad had been given by a colleague at the German Embassy.

I met a guy who worked at the Black Star Agency and conned him into giving me a few freelance assignments. Eventually I travelled to a variety of American cities and small towns and my work was published in several obscure trade publications.

One day I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend. He was working for a photographer who had segued into directing and shooting television commercials. A lot of cars and a lot of women. I could do that.

So I made commercials for about fifteen years until I got fed up with all the mercurial bullshit.

Finally, I said to my wife “fuck it…let’s write something”. So we wrote four screenplays which are currently in various stages of mercurial bullshit studio development.

(Tugging along these two-timing traintracks, persuaded to sing/mumble this damned anthem)

We’re all too homesick and so housebroken

(Anxious like stubborn stock markets)

But in the distance

(And through these empty spaces and their signaled echoes),

A setting sun, like an allowing toll-booth, reassures us

that sand becomes mountains become monuments become sand

(Nothing can ever stay precious on a sinking ship)

and that barricades are only as decisive as we make them

(So we sway back and forth/forth and back with the motions, hoping to reach anywhere or elsewhere)

‘No homeland ever’, the tides hint; ‘No homeland ever’.

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This installation, composed of close to one thousand entirely handmade tree stumps and trunks, dozens of flags and life size characters, all carefully rendered and positioned, spans upon the space of approximately 100 square meters and reaches the height of over 3 meters high.

The piece attempts to examine the ideas of patriotism, not exclusively in a political sense, but more as a metaphor for a human condition-

the notion of being homesick, and the relieving of that same notion, by the means of personal sacrifice and compromise.

Throughout the makeshift forest built in the space, the characters are seen amongst piles of tree stumps, amputated arms and discarded flags; sometimes bound to the flagpoles reaching out helplessly to each other, carrying logs, or simply adjusting and functioning in the certain reality with which they are intertwined.

Being ‘bound’ is a recurring notion in this installation, as an analogy to a certain pact, an agreement into which one side was persuaded to take part of, and ultimately compromise and make a significant sacrifice. The installation is a certain reflection, a situation of sobering realization of past decisions, regrets and the hindsight on all these things.

This ‘sacrifice’ manifests itself by the characters forfeiting their limbs, a sign of devotion to support the flag in its upright position.

The red dots on the amputated arms correspond with the red dots on the tree stumps, signifying the notion that they were all ‘cut off’, and in a way left as waste with no significant function as initially promised or expected. These elements even seem ‘stockpiled’, as the title of the installation suggests.

The choice of the flags being white, not necessarily as a sign of surrender, but more a conscious decision of not attributing it to a certain nation or nationality relates to the reflection being universal, contemplating the devotion to ‘a flag’, not ‘the flag’.

These things raise questions regarding ones perception of a homeland, questioning its existence at all.